Databases, such as IBM's IMS (Information Management System), are well known in the art. (IMS is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.) IMS is a hierarchical database management system with wide spread usage in many large enterprises where high transaction volume, reliability, availability and scalability are of the utmost importance. IMS provides software and interfaces for running the businesses of many of the world's largest corporations.
A large DBMS, such as IMS, is highly scalable and in some enterprise environments may accommodate thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users connected to the system at any given point in time. Furthermore, the information and data managed by the DBMS may be highly sensitive data, critical to the operation of the enterprise as well as critical to the individual users of the DBMS system. Travel reservation systems, inventory control, and online banking systems are some typical examples. Therefore, it is typical for a large DBMS to include a logging capability to capture and record the various events that occur in the course of managing databases as various database requests and transactions are processed.
These log datasets (or files) typically contain a wealth of information. Although the primary purpose of these logs is to facilitate data and processing integrity of the database management system, users have often found many other uses for the data recorded on DBMS logs. For example, reviewing log records may be useful in identifying trends, managing performance, auditing users, system planning, etc.
System utilities, such as DFSERA10 in the case of IMS, are typically used to access and format log records. However, a significant drawback exists with today's formatting utilities in that the actual data within a particular field of a log record may be in one of numerous forms. Some of these forms are very difficult for humans to interpret, such as binary or hexadecimal data forms.
Accordingly, there is a great need to provide a log access and format utility for the hierarchical database management environment that presents log data of interest to a user within a context that will assist the user in interpreting and understanding the log data. Furthermore, it is highly desirable for this log utility to be flexible such that only log records of interest to the user are selectively formatted. The log utility should also be convenient to use whereby the DBMS is not adversely impacted in availability or performance during execution of the log utility.